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For the past two decades, IWRM has been actively promoted by water experts as well as multilateral and bilateral donors who have considered it to be a crucial way to address global water management problems. IWRM has been incorporated into water laws, reforms and policies of southern African nations. This is a special issue 'Flows and Practices: The Politics of IWRM in southern Africa' of the journal Water Alternatives. The empirical findings of the complexities of articulation and implementation of IWRM in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Tanzania and Uganda form the core of this special issue. We demonstrate how Africa has been a laboratory for IWRM experiments, while donors as well as a new cadre of water professionals and students have made IWRM their mission. The case studies reveal that IWRM may have resulted in an unwarranted policy focus on managing water instead of enlarging poor women’s and men’s access to water. The newly created institutional arrangements tended to centralise the power and control of the State and powerful users over water and failed to address historically rooted inequalities.

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The report presents the key findings from the project Sustainable water management for resilience to climate change impact on society in South Africa. The project was carried out as a collaboration between SINTEF and Stellenbosch University, with Hessequa Municipality as a partner.

The main objective of this study was to quantify the impacts of climate change on hydropower resources in East Africa thereby providing a basis for integrating the impact of Climate Change in hydropower development in the region.

The Testing REDD+ in the Beira Landscape Corridor of Mozambique initiative closed in December. Over nearly four years, a consortium of public academic and research institutions, NGOs and social enterprises, supported by the Government of Norway, has explored what drives deforestation and forest degradation.

Forests play a dual role in climate change. Forests can be a source of greenhouse gases, emitting carbon dioxide to the atmosphere when they are burned or destroyed, and forests can also act as a “sink,” removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing it as carbon in their biomass as they grow.

As pressure from human activities on the natural world intensifies, and as humans become more aware of their impact on the environment, our interest in and need for protection and planning for sustainable use of our environment has increased tremendously.

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